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Paranorman is a title I was excited about for a while, but then it dropped off my radar. Discovering it on Netflix this past weekend was a nice surprise, and I decided it was high time I watched it. I’d heard briefly that it wasn’t very well-received, though doing a little bit of research online tells me that impression was wrong, that it didn’t have stellar reviews but was overall considered decent, and was nominated for and even won some awards.

Which I’m glad of, because it was a damn good movie in a lot of ways.

The movie features Norman, an 11 year old boy who can see and talk with the dead. Naturally this causes a large amount of awkwardness with the living, who don’t typically don’t believe in Norman’s abilities. At best, they tend to think of him as a freak. At worst… Well, Norman’s relationship with his father makes me downright uncomfortable. His father is an abrasive man, someone who doesn’t hold with Norman’s talk of ghosts, and who makes no bones about it. When Norman snaps at him that he didn’t ask to be born the way he was, his father snaps back, “Well, neither did we.”

Ouch.

So right off the bat there’s some uncomfortable tension with his father’s intolerance and refusal to pull any punches, and for a kids’ movie, that was a bit surprising. Much of the time in movies intended for younger audiences, when there’s parental opposition to a main character, it’s because said parent is intentionally portrayed as a bad guy, maybe an evil to overcome, or else a pawn for that evil. Here we see something more akin to a kid and his father flat-out not getting along, something much more mundane, and for what it’s worth, while it hurts to see, it’s also a bit refreshing to see a portrayal of a family that has its problems without being the main problem. In introduces kids to the uncomfortable concept that families don’t always get along, that sometimes adults are blindly cruel, and that sometimes you’re going to face crap from people you love.

In short, it’s something to possibly gets kids and parents talking. And I’m fond of things that might influence parents to be parents and actually explain things to their kids, even if those things are awkward and unpleasant sometimes.

Anyway, Norman can see and communicate with the dead, and goes through hell for it. As if that weren’t bad enough, during a school play about the town’s history and folklore (involving a witch’s curse, because New England), he starts to see the world around him break and burn, revealing hints of something sinister underneath. The town eccentric, Mr. Prenderghast, approaches Norman and tells him that he has a job to do, that only he can hold back the witch’s curse and prevent the dead from rising.

Oh, did I mention that Prenderghast is dead for part of this revelation, and that Norman was talking to his ghost?

Also that Prenderghast is Norman’s uncle? And that Norman is now the only person in the family who can possibly hold back the curse? And that Prenderghast has nor moved on to the afterlife and can’t be contacted anymore for additional info?

No? Well, now you know just how the plot thickens.

Norman’s supposed to read from a certain book at the witch’s grave before sundown that night, to stave off the curse for another year and keep the town safe. The problem is that Norman goes to the wrong grave, reads from a book of what looks like fairy tales, and surprise, nothing happens except for the curse coming to fruition and raising the corpses of the 7 men who condemned the witch in the 1700s.

So now there are zombies on the loose. Lovely.

Norman and friends (or rather, Norman and his only friend Neil, along with Normal’s sister, Neil’s brother, and a local bully named Alvin) are led on a merry chase through the town, trying to evade the zombies and also find out exactly where the witch’s grave is so that Norman can read from the book at the proper place. It’s not really a surprise to hear that Norman does eventually find the grave and defeat the curse, but the how of it all is the really interesting part.

(Warning: spoilers abound.)

Norman can communicate with the dead, and typically this is just something that happens with ghosts, but as it turns out, since zombies are dead too, Norman can communicate with them. He discovered that the witch was, in fact, a little girl his own age, who could also communicate with the dead, who was accused of witchcraft and sentenced to death for it. In her terror, she let loose something horrible, cursing the 7 people who condemned her, and over time getting so wrapped up in her fear and hatred that she turned terrible and cruel herself. The now-zombies have had plenty of time to think about their actions, to regret what they did to a young child, and who want to end the curse and be able to fully rest.

It’s still up to Norman to still the curse, but he realises that holding it back every year doesn’t actually fix the underlying problem. The book of fairy tales is meant to act like a bedtime story, to put a little girl to sleep, but every year she’ll keep waking up angry and still want her vengeance. Norman has to get to the heart of the problem, trying to convince the witch, who is really a very scared and angry little girl named Agatha, that she doesn’t need to lash out anymore, that she’s not alone and isolated because of her power, and that bullying because you were bullied doesn’t actually make you better than anyone.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and I love it. First, there’s the presentation of the idea that sometimes what creates a bully is being bullied, that sometimes people stick up walls around themselves as lash out because they were hurt first, and being just as cruel and the cruel people is the only way you feel like you have any way to defend yourself. (But also sometimes bullies can just be jerks, like Alvin; sometimes you don’t get an explanation or a reason.) You see people doing terrible things that they thought were right and good at the time, but only upon reflection and consequence do they see the error of their ways. You see mob mentality, when the townspeople attack the zombies, and even after the zombies escape the townspeople go on fighting because they’re so caught up in fear and fighting that they don’t even see that what they were fighting is already gone. They’re ready to burn down a building with the zombies inside, trapping kids and teens in there, refusing to listen to their cries for help and mercy. It’s some dark stuff, especially for a kids’ movie, and really, I love it. Kids can often handle way more than we think they can, especially when it’s presented to them in an action-packed entertaining way, and if they have questions about people certain things happened, then hopefully they’ve got decent parents around to answer those questions.

Paranorman goes beyond the usual trite messages about being nice to bullies and just being brave in the face of adversity. It talks about how people can become so fearful they lose all rationality. It talks about how people are not always good. It says you can’t always trust adults to watch out for you and be on your side. It says that people can make mistakes, even huge mistakes, and still be forgiven if they learn from those mistakes. This stuff applies not only to the issue of Agatha and her curse, but also on a smaller scale, with Norman’s dad. At the end of the movie, we see him awkwardly start to take Norman a bit more seriously about his ghost-talking abilities, not fully comfortable with it yet, but at least willing to put aside his own discomfort and reach out to the son he previously derided. It was a small gesture that meant a lot.

Besides, dude drove zombies around in his car. Pretty hard to deny the whole “communicating with the dead” thing after that.

The movie also had a great reading-between-the-lines bit that I feel is worth mentioning. Norman’s uncle’s surname is Prenderghast. Agatha’s surname is Prenderghast. Agatha, Norman, and his uncle, all have the ability to see the dead. It’s never said outright, but there are strong hints that Norman is related to Agatha. Norman’s surname is different, and it’s never said which side of Norman’s family Mr. Prenderghast is on, but the implication is there, that the abilities are a hereditary thing. Of course, it could be complete coincidence, but really, I choose to believe there’s a connection. That it’s left there as a subtle thing for people to pick up on makes me like the movie that much more, since it doesn’t act like the audience needs its hand held to learn every single thing, which is a big problem in a lot of kids’ movies. Sometimes you can leave subtle things in and still have people pick up on them, and even if nobody does, nothing is really lost in the viewing. You don’t need to know that Agatha might be Norman’s ancestor and that their powers might run in the family. All you need to know is that sometimes these powers happen.

Also, can I take a minute to mention Mitch, Neil’s jock brother? Norman’s sister Courtney spends half the movie hitting on him, trying to get close to him, catch his interest, and most of the time he comes across as utterly oblivious. I mean, who can blame him when there are zombies around, really? Then at the end, Courtney asks him if he wants to see a movie together, and he’s all, “Sure, also btw, my boyfriend would love that movie.”

And that, friends, is how you normalize gay characters in media. Don’t make the characters stereotypical, don’t have some big scene where he tries to let Courtney down gently and says, “Sorry, I’m flattered, but *deep breath* I’m gay.” Don’t have people freak out about it. Just, “Yup, got a boyfriend, you’d probably like him.” Mitch is who he is, and you either like him or you don’t, and his sexuality is part of him but not his definition.

That reveal did make me wonder, however, how many angry letters got written by parents, telling the producers how they shouldn’t have included a gay character in a mainstream movie because it’s “inappropriate, and how am I going to explain that to my kids?”

Overall, I really enjoyed Paranorman. It’s not a perfect movie, there were some unanswered questions, and some of the scenes were a little cheese, but really, it was still pretty good. It was a dark but somewhat comedic movie, an animated horror flick for younger audiences, with a lot of strong themes that went beyond what I expected and made for a well developed and engaging story. Given that I heard almost nothing about it after its theatrical release, I’d venture to say that it’s even a bit underrated. There’s more to it than a kiddy Halloween movie, there’s plenty that adults could enjoy, and it’s one that I expect I’ll watch more than once, because it was fun and interesting and does a lot that I can respect. Definitely worth checking out if you haven’t yet.

Everybody is talking about this movie. Freaking everyone. And it’s generally getting the reaction of, “Holy crap, this movie is so great,” and I’m honestly in that camp, though I think the movie did have its share of problems. I really enjoyed it. And there were more than a few moments that left me unable to eat my popcorn while certain scenes were going on.

There will be spoilers in this review. I’ll try to keep them to a minimum, and plot-related ones will be hidden behind areas you have to highlight to read, but if you consider character names and mentions of events to be spoilers, then fair warning, you may not want to read this until after you’ve seen the movie for yourself.

The movie, by and large, is about how the Death Star plans — the ones that showed its improbable weakness in Episode IV — made it to the Rebel Alliance in the first place. Definitely an interesting idea, and one that clears up a fannish nitpick that’s been around since oh, before I was born. The story is told around Jyn Erso, daughter of a man who worked on the Death Star, and I say that it all takes place around her because she’s not exactly a driving force behind the plot. In fact, aside from an impassioned speech and a little half-hearted rebellion against the Rebels toward the end, she largely gets carried along with the story as other people push the plot forward. It’s one thing to have a reluctant hero, and I think that’s what they were going for with Jyn, but it comes off more like a passive figurehead that you’re supposed to root for because… personal reasons? She’s hardly the most compelling character in the mix.

I was already forewarned that Rogue One wasn’t going to have the strong female character that people expected, so while that did disappoint me, it wasn’t surprising. And part of the disappoint came from wondering why the writers, directors, et al, couldn’t have done better. Really, Jyn’s presence isn’t all that necessary for the story in Rogue One to take place. The Rebels need her to get close to Saw Gererra, an extremist who has information the rebels need. She becomes useful at the end when she figures out the codename of the Death Star plans. And that’s pretty much it. The rest of the story largely rests on the shoulders of Cassian, Bodhi, and a couple of other side characters whose names get mentioned (at least one of them does) but not so clearly that I could actually make out what they were called. One was pretty much a Blind Asian Monk archetype, and to be perfectly honest, I’d have watched a whole movie about that guy. That guy kicked some serious ass.

That and a reprogrammed droid K-2SO, but who I tended to call Sassy Droid because that about sums up the entirety of his character. But Sassy Droid was pretty awesome.

I think it’s fairly safe to say that, weirdly, the strength of Rogue One isn’t in its characters. It felt at times like too large a cast of characters being handled by people who weren’t sure how to, well, actually handle a large cast of characters. Development was uneven, with some characters having clear motivations for doing what they did, and others just getting swept along for the ride and generally not adding much to the plot. Some of the characters were needed to have plot points fall into place, but otherwise didn’t really contribute. Others, like Blind Asian Monk and his Pet Mercenary, seemed to exist largely to be awesome and competent and then sacrifice their lives for the greater good and so make us feel all the feels.

Don’t get me wrong. Feels were definitely felt. But one emotional scene doesn’t mean the character was important or strong, and I think somewhere along the way, that got forgotten.

So if the strength of the movie isn’t in its characters, where is it? Well, from where I stand, it’s in its overall themes and message. Because at its heart, Rogue One was a war movie. And a powerful one. It’s a story about how far people will go to take down an oppressive regime, of the sacrifices they will make and what they will risk. It’s a story that conveys much about tyranny in a short period of time. In that regard, it’s absolutely worth watching, and it was the strength of those themes that made me think that, despite its deficits, it was a damn good movie.

Take the scene very near the beginning, in an Imperial-occupied city, where people meet in secret and share information, however reluctantly. Knowing they could be killed if caught. When one oversteps and kills a Stormtrooper, the other panics, knowing that he won’t be able to escape due to either injury robotic arm or other disability (the movie isn’t entirely clear on that, only that one of his arms doesn’t function properly), that his life is pretty much over because he risked opposing the Empire in a tiny way. The tension of hiding, of keeping your head down, of knowing that other people can be and probably will be harmed in order to get to you. Take the attack on Jedha, where tensions come to a head and rebels attack Imperial forces who are abusing citizens, and plenty of citizens get caught in the crossfire. The scene is chaotic and terrible and emotional, and seeing this only days after the horrific attack in Aleppo, and knowing that there are probably people who care more about the details in the Jedha attack scene in Rogue One than the real attack in our real world struck me so deeply that I couldn’t move for the entirety of the scene.

Take the tests of power by the Death Star. Only a fraction of what we see in A New Hope, no planets are fully destroyed, but the smaller-scale destruction is so powerfully conveyed in Rogue One because unlike in A New Hope, there’s no distance between the attack and the victims. There’s no sudden disturbance in the Force, felt by somebody light years away. There are people, on the ground, facing an oncoming wave of destruction with no way to escape it. With imagery similar to the mushroom cloud of an atom bomb, it seemed to me a stark condemnation of those who would jump straight to idea of nuclear attack to destroy “our enemies,” without any idea of what that really entails for people caught in the blast. All most people have to go on these days are grainy pictures of test explosions to fuel their imaginations; they have this idea that a nuclear bomb is just some big version of a stick of dynamite. And though it’s a fictional representation, seeing Rebels and Imperials get destroyed by the same device, casualties of war, statistics on paper made flesh because we followed their stories, drives home the point that indiscriminate killing is utterly terrifying.

Take the scene of the Alliance discussing what to do after they discover what the Death Star is capable of. To retreat, or to stand and fight, or to scatter? The argument that fighting against oppression isn’t the same as signing a suicide pact, that even though you accept that some of your people will be lost to the cause, that’s not the same as deliberately throwing yourself into danger and not even knowing if you’ll accomplish anything. The clear presentation of the downsides to democracy — the opposite of tyranny, where nobody gets a voice — in that sometimes democracy means the majority vote resulting in not pushing for your freedom, because enough people say it’s not worth it.

It was this stuff that really did it for me. The movie’s characters are hit-or-miss, there’s some amusement in seeing cameos from old favourites (including a couple that I couldn’t see the sense of, but that’s neither here nor there), but Rogue One‘s greatest strength is in its portrayal of rebellion, of war and its cost, of sacrifice, or difficult decisions. The movie doesn’t say these things right out. It’s not so blatant. But the imagery seemed pretty clear to me, and there was a lot that was conveyed not so much in words but in tone and image. That was what got to me. Not the characters or their sketchy motivations, but in the way the movie talked about war and death and what it takes to do what needs to be done.

Though I will take a moment to mention one other thing that made the movie awesome for me: Vader. I could go into a litany of reasons why the prequels ruined Vader, but I won’t. Other people have done that far better than I could. But after years of seeing the man who will become Darth Vader essentially by a spoiled and easily misled brat, Rogue One brings us back to the utterly terrifying Sith lord that fans first saw. He’s an intimidating presence, mysterious and powerful and 100% somebody you don’t want paying too much attention to you. A scene toward the end has him mowing down people left and right, not pausing for a moment, human lives inconsequential to him in pursuit of his goals, and that‘s the Vader that people saw none of in the prequels! A man who wears brutality like a mantle. We know how we began, we know how he ended, nothing about this character’s life is a secret anymore. But to see him return to being the character many of us first knew felt like justice. This is the Vader we needed to see again. He needed to become a figure of menace once more, and Rogue One had him do just that. It was the movie’s greatest characterization moment, and granted, that’s not saying much when all they had to do was have him act like he did in the original trilogy, but still. It was fantastic to see.

Anyone who has watched the original Star Wars trilogy knows how the movie will end. The movie’s conclusion isn’t a secret. The plans get to the Rebels. The team in charge knew that the “will-they-or-won’t-they” tension would be utterly absent from the film, so they tried to make it all about how. How they did what they did. Who took part in the effort. In some ways they succeeded. In others, not so much. But I think the movie had more good moments than it did bad ones. If you’re someone who’s incredibly character-driven and needs strong and well-developed characters to enjoy a movie, then it may not hold up to your expectations. But if you can appreciate it for more than just that, if you can see what it’s trying to say rather than who’s trying to say it, then I think you’ll come out of the theatre with the same reaction that most of us have. Rogue One is a damn good movie, and an excellent addition to the Star Wars universe.

I’m very much a fan of east-Asian horror movies, and so by luck and Netflix, I stumbled across an interesting-looking Korean movie not too long ago, called by its English name, The Silenced.

Set in Seoul, then known as Gyeongseong, in the late 1930s, the story focuses on a sick young woman named Shizuko, sent to a sanitarium school. And if you noticed that I used a Japanese name for the character and not a Korean one, there’s a reason for that. At the time this movie takes place, Korea was under Japanese occupation, and one of the many societal changes that occurred then was to force the adoption of Japanese-style names instead of Korean ones, to bring the populace one step closer to accepting occupational rule by a foreign power. (For a brief overview of the occupation, there’s at least a Wikipedia page, which I recommend reading.) As someone making at least half-hearted efforts to learn Japanese, I can pick out the language when I hear it, and suddenly when a character just starts speaking a language I recognize when I expect a language I can’t recognise… I threw me off, and caught my attention, and made me want to learn more about the setting.

It also made me keenly aware of how much cultural time-period markers are not universal. In North America, we may associate the 1930s with a certain style of fashion, mode of speech, level of technology, and when we see movies set then, we don’t have to have a full history lesson to centre us in the moment. 1930s South Korea? I was forced to confront that I knew absolutely nothing about it. You don’t need a history lesson to appreciate The Silenced, though; reading a book on the Japanese occupation isn’t central to understanding the movie as a whole. But if you have an ear for languages and culture, you may be able to pick up on a few things that may confuse you if you’re entirely unaware that there was an occupation to begin with.

Anyway, Shizuko, who we later come to learn is also called Ju-Ran, is sick and sent to a girl’s boarding school to recover. Immediately she faces opposition, as she shares the same name as a previous girl who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The official story is that the previous Shizuko went home, but the girls there doubt that, as it was sudden and unannounced. The new Shizuko has TB, and is shown to barely be able to handle any exertion lest it send her into a coughing fit. She’s put on a new medication to try and combat the illness, and that’s where things start to get weird.

Shizuko starts seeing things. Creepy things. Things like one of the girls being twisted and jerky while crawl-shuffling under her bed.

Then that student disappears, and everyone’s told she just went home. Meanwhile, Shizuko finds a strange sticky clear fluid under that girl’s bed, and she’s sure she wasn’t imagining it.

This isn’t the only time Shizuko sees something and a girl disappears, leaving behind more of that clear goo. Shizuko also begins to show signs of recovery, her physical strength and stamina increasing to the point where she can run again and breathe easily. But it doesn’t stop there. Her strength continues to grow, as does her temper, and her resistance to pain.

It’s at this point where watchers start to wonder if the current Shizuko is possessed by the previous one in some way, if the previous Shizuko died and her ghost is lashing out not only at those who wronger her in life, but also those who wrong the girl who shares her name. It’s the sort of explanation that makes perfect sense in horror movies, especially East Asian horror movies where it all looks like a ghost story. But the truth behind this movie is even stranger than you might imagine.

And be warned, there are some spoilers a-comin’!

The problem turns out not to be a ghost but instead a program funded by the Japanese occupational government to create a race of super-soldiers. The medication that Shizuko has to take — indeed, all the students have to take medication provided by the school, and nobody questions it because everyone is there due to illness (though the vast majority are unspecified and unpresented…) — is part of that program, changing her into someone stronger, impervious to pain, someone capable of fighting for the Japanese government in times of need. None of them consented. Not all of them survive.

And what’s really impressive about The Silenced is that aside from the clear goo, everything actually ties together and makes sense. It shifts from seeming like a horror movie to a historical sci-fi thriller, and it does it fairly seamlessly. The transition makes sense, the story aspects fit together and get explanations, and given that all this happens within a massive tonal shift, that really impressed me. It’s not many movies that can do that and still stay cohesive. It’s a mind-screw for a while, trying to wrap your brain around how something switched genres right in the middle, and admittedly some of the special effects of Shizuko’s later superpowers were kind of cheesy, but on the whole, I’d say it was pretty well done.

The only loose end is the issue of the clear goop left behind after Shizuko sees someone losing control after they have a bad reaction to the chemical mixture that’s slowly changing them. There are a couple of things this could be, but nothing is really made of it; it seems like it’s there just to convince Shizuko that she didn’t image things, that there’s a physical source of the creepy things she sees. It’s a bit disappointing, though, that a movie which ties so many things together leaves that one hanging, with just potential reading between the lines to try and give it reason.

The Silenced deals with some very twisted and disturbing subject matter. There’s the obvious issue of the Japanese occupation and forced cultural integration, which I mentioned at the beginning of the review. There’s the issue of testing unknown treatments without informed consent, a process which is still relatively new in the field of medicine, and that’s depressing enough, but the movie stresses that part of the reason that the sanitarium/boarding school was chosen as part of the project is that it works best on adolescent women, and also because nobody’s going to question, “These girls are taking medication we give them because they’re sick, they have no parental supervision, and if any one of them dies, it’s easy to get rid of evidence and just tell everyone they went home.” It all works because people are kept ignorant. The movie’s primary antagonist hates her country and wants Japan to have greater control, hence her being complicit in the supersoldier program. There’s a lot that’s shown, not said, and The Silenced largely seems to respect the viewer’s intelligence enough to not spell absolutely everything else, to have a fanatical woman without a character commenting, “Wow, she’s fanatical.”

I have to say, if you’re into East Asian horror, this is one you should probably check out. Even though it’s not strictly a horror movie. The story’s certainly interesting, the acting fantastic (with a bonus helping of subtext along the way…), and I still can’t get over how well it was all put together. It’s disturbing and creepy in all the right places, atmospheric and tense without relying on jump scares, and has a lot to say about a very controversial time in Korea’s history. It’s on Canadian Netflix as of the time this review, so if that’s open to you, I recommend taking a couple of hours to enjoy it.

I was going to start this review by saying that I figured it would be fairly safe to assume that anyone seeing this movie was probably a fan of the Harry Potter franchise, or at least familiar with it. And really, chances are that most of them are. I certainly hope so, since understanding the wizarding world is pretty much a pre-requisite for Fantastic Beasts; the movie not only assumes that you have watched the Harry Potter movies to at least having passing familiarity with them, but also assumes you’ve read the books enough to remember, and oh, also, hope you’ve been enjoying Pottermore, because there’s some stuff that’s probably going to see pretty random if you haven’t.

That’s not to say that Fantastic Beasts is incomprehensible without this advanced knowledge. But it does make for a far better movie-going experience, and it feels like the directors banked on people having this information beforehand. It’s a movie made for those who are already fans of the series, essentially: if you’re looking at your local theatre listings and contemplating whether or not to see this because your friend says you really ought to finally get into this whole Harry Potter business, then I think a fair bit of the enjoyment to be had will not, actually, be had by you. It’s a side story to the franchise, and it expects you to know the franchise going in. The most egregious example is that all of the foreshadowing leading up to the movie’s big reveal with be entirely lost on any viewers that haven’t done their homework in advance.

But that being said, let’s dive into the plot of the movie! Let’s look at some fantastic beasts and see where we find them! (Warning: there will be spoilers ahead. Major ones will be whited-out so you have to highlight them to see, though.)

The movie has 2 side-by-side plots, starting with New Scamander, fresh off the boat from the UK, enchanted suitcase filled with magical creatures in hand as he walks around New York City. Through happenstance, some of his creatures escape, and hijinks ensue as he tries to get one back before it steals all the shiny things (no, really, Nifflers love shiny things). In the mayhem, he accidentally switches his suitcase with that of a Muggle — excuse me, a no-maj; we’re in America now — and with the rather unwilling help of disgraced magic law enforcement, he has to get it back. Now, magical and non-magical people are utterly forbidden from interacting in America, apparently, so this guy who now has Newt’s suitcase, well, he’s in a lot of danger after he discovers that the world is not as devoid of magic as people would have him believe, but after developing a friendship with Newt (and a crush on a witch), he ends up helping Newt recover the remainder of his missing creatures.

The 2nd of the movie’s plots, and by far the more interesting one, involves a group known as Second Salem, who claims that witches are among us and that they must be wiped out. It’s practically a cult, led by a woman who seems to take in children and raise them to violently hate witches and magic. But one of the older kids in the group, Credence, is working with America’s magical community, trying to uncover the identity of a strong magic child whose suppressed power is getting loose and causing damage and terror around the city. Not only that, but Graves, the man that Credence reports to, promises Credence a place within the magical community once his task is complete.

I’m simplifying the plots a bit here, but for the most part, that gives you a decent idea of what stories the movie is trying to tell without getting into some of the more complex details.

As the movie goes on, the story shifts more from Newt trying to get his beasts back and focuses on the darker and more tense plot of cultish abuse and repressed power run amok. Which is where part of my problem with the movie arises. While it was great to occasionally step away from the darker themes in the movie and have a couple of more lighthearted moments, the whole subplot with New trying to get his magical creatures back made the overall story feel very loose in the first half of the movie. The Niffler chase scene, I can understand. The bit with the Occamy I can even understand, because it’s large enough to cause serious destruction and I can get wanting to rule that out as a possible cause of the dark magic roaming around New York City. But there were other scenes that felt like nothing so much as an excuse to try a little humour and to pad out the film’s runtime while showing off some CGI effects.

And to be fair, the CGI was great. The visuals on the magical creatures was awesome, and I kind of want to live inside Newt’s suitcase. It was a great chance for long-time fans of the series to see some of their favourite creatures come to glorious life, and I’m on board with that. But it led to me feeling like the plot could have been far tighter, and more than once I hoped for the movie to speed along a little bit so that we could get to what I thought was a far more interesting aspect of the story.

Especially once you get deeper into that plot. Turns out that when a witch or wizard suppresses their powers, it can turn dark and be unleashed as a violent force, which is called an Obscurus. That’s the force that’s been ruining New York buildings and cause chaos before Newt even arrived. It’s was a fascinating look at what uncontrolled fear and repression can do, taking a very real-world psychiatric issue and turning it into something physical, something to be seen and felt, as Rowling once did with depression and Dementors. That people in the know are sure the wizard or witch who produced the Obscurus is somewhere within the Second Salem cult just lends an even greater dose of pity to the problem; this person clearly hid themselves because they were taught, brutally, that magic is evil and people who do magic are terrible and should be obliterated, and who wouldn’t hide their true self under that kind of onslaught, even to the point of convincing themselves that they had no magic to begin with? I adored this aspect of the plot, because it said so much about repression and danger and self-expression while still staying entertaining and full of action that makes for good viewing on the big screen. It was a great melding of various elements, and that’s why I wish more of the movie had focused on this.

As it was, we were given our intro to this in dribbles in the beginning, hints that got overshadowed by Newt’s personal quest, and only after Newt’s quest is finished to we really jump into the story that could have and probably should have been the driving force behind the bulk of the movie, not just the second half of it.

As for the casting, I’ve got to say, the characters were played incredibly well. I can’t say they were true to any characters established in the booms, because none of them were actually in any books before this. But they were still great characters. Redmayne’s portrayal of Newt Scamander was great, managing to create a very awkward character who has his passions and interests and knows that other people find them uninteresting but doesn’t let that stop him. Dan Fogler playing Jacob, the man who finds himself suddenly surrounded by supposedly-impossible magic, does a good job of playing the everyman who finds out something fantastical; the right mix of shock and surprise and still trucking along with life because what else can you do? He’s enamoured of the magical world but not repulsed by it. And holy crap, Ezra Miller playing Credence was just… If you want to see an example of how to play someone who is painfully shy, neglected, afraid of himself and the world around him, then look at this performance. You could really feel what the character was experiencing, the way his eyes wouldn’t quite meet another character’s. the resigned way we walked through life, or handed his own belt over to an abusive cult leader in order to be beaten by it…

So here’s where I’m going to talk about the part that I really didn’t like about the movie, and it contains white-out spoilers, so be warned: Graves, the man that has been using Credence to find the source of the Obscurus, the man who seems to think that the ends justify the means, the one who is sick of wizards having to keep themselves secret from non-magical people, is revealed to be Gellert Grindlewald in disguise. And this, to me, was a huge weakness in the movie’s storytelling. It wasn’t enough that somebody could be a bad guy, they had to be the bad guy. It seemed so simplistic when you compare it to a lot of other messages about such things in Rowling’s books. Remember the great line about how the world isn’t split into heroes and Death Eaters? So it wasn’t enough that Graves by an actual person who was ruthless in his pursuit of the Obscurus, hoping to possibly harness its power to defeat Grindlewald’s forces in Europe, stepping over a child’s welfare to do it. No, he had to be the big bad himself, disguised as someone else, because apparently nobody could have those views other than someone we already know to basically be wizard-Hitler.

This brings me back to what I mentioned about needing to do your homework before seeing this movie, though. The movie does admittedly open with some quick clips of newspaper articles talking about the atrocities Grindlewald is committing, and his name is dropped a couple of times through the movie as a reference to him being a bad guy, but the movie itself gives you precious little context for what that really means, who he really is. You don’t know that he’s basically wizard-Hitler. You don’t know that he was the most powerful Dark wizard until Voldemort came along. You don’t really get a sense of what he has to do with anything, until it’s revealed to all be about him. Fans who have read the books and watched the movies will get why this is important, but for those who haven’t, who are maybe just seeing this movie because people say it’s good, are not actually going to get the full effect of this reveal. Most of the movie’s watchers aren’t likely to pick up on this, because they already know his importance. Anyone else? Zoom, it goes, right over their heads.

It’s one thing to make a movie to appeal to fans. It’s another to make a movie with storytelling that only fans will appreciate, because the fans can fill in the faulty storytelling with their advance knowledge. This is a problem I had with the original Harry Potter movies as they went on. The stories got so complex that much of the actual story had to get cut out of the movie in order to reach the end without having a 5+ hour film to sit through. And so few people even noticed because they already knew what the blanks were filled in with beforehand. The 3rd and 6th movies were particularly terrible for this, for reasons I can and have gone on at length about.

I won’t spend too long discussing plot holes, though there were a few. Mostly in the form of unanswered questions and moments where you have to suspend disbelief a little too much. Why didn’t Tina say, “Oh hey, you’re blaming me for not telling you info that I tried to tell you the other day but you kicked me out?” How does the potion at the end affect anyone who wasn’t outside or conveniently in the shower when it was rained down on the city to help them all forget what happened? Unanswered nitpicky questions, over issues that make for great visuals and typical movie tropes, but these things are nitpicky, and they don’t ruin the movie. Just things for fans to debate in the future, probably, and I’m okay with that. No movie is perfect.

Despite having a couple of large problems with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, I still have to say that I did, in fact, enjoy the movie. The visuals were great, and I, like many, loved seeing many of the magic creatures from the Harry Potter universe come to life. It was a fun movie, with a dark plot that tackled some hard issues, plenty to discuss between fans, and the acting was impressive. As I said, it wasn’t perfect, but most of those imperfections come to light only when you really look below the surface; without doing that, it can still be enjoyed and appreciated. It’s worth seeing, doubly so if you’re already a fan of the franchise, and I’m interested to see the story continue in future installments.

I don’t know how I manage it, but I seem to keep finding the most effed-up Asian horror movies on Netflix. This time it was a Hong Kong horror flick known as Baby Blues, a title that is meant to not just the color of newborn eyes, but also postpartum depression.

Or in the case of the movie, postpartum psychotic break caused by a haunted doll.

The movie starts with Hao and his wife, Tian Qing, moving to a new and gorgeous house, shown to them by a very enthusiastic real estate agent. During the showing, Tian Qing finds a creepy doll left behind by the previous owners, and she decides that she really wants to keep it for some reason. Because all a new house needs is he addition of a bleeding-eyes doll to make it complete. Tian Qing is a blogger, and Hao is a songwriter who, upon moving to this new and impossibly gorgeous house, starts getting a little obsessed with writing songs about death. Which might not be so bad, if the song he’s working on didn’t make his wife throw up, and end up influencing a singer to crash her car and die.

The movie flat-out mentions the song Gloomy Sunday, so it’s not like they’re trying to hide the similarities between that and the urban legend, so there’s that.

Anyway, as Hao continues his campaign to depress the music-loving world, Tian Qing finds that she’s pregnant. Not just pregnant, but pregnant with twin boys! Hao names them Adam and Jimmy by writing said names on Tian Qing’s belly, in a scene that’s legitimately a bit cute. Problems arise, though, when Jimmy is stillborn, and Tian Qing, in her grief and denial, decides to replace him with the creepy doll. Hao is understandably worried, but his songwriting demands much of his time, and doctors say that it’s likely just postpartum depression, and she’ll recover.

In the defense of the doctors, Hao never actually told them, “So, my wife thinks a random doll is our second son, and she’s starting to care about the doll more than the living child.” That might have raised so red flags.

The story continues to reveal that the doll is related to an accidental death between twins in that house. The doll seems to be possessed less by an actual spirit, and more by the grief and malice from previous residents that experienced grief and betrayal. Tian Qing is deep in its influence, now muttering darkly about how Jimmy-the-doll doesn’t like Adam, how Hao doesn’t like Jimmy, how Jimmy is the centre of her world, and in all honesty, the actress’s portrayal of a woman over the edge was actually pretty good. She was unhinged, half-possessed, and she showed it well, so I’m a fan of her performance. After the story comes out, Hao sets out to remove the doll from the house and to destroy it, to free his family from its influence.

I can’t help but feel that this movie was having a bit of an identity crisis. On one hand, it used some beautiful imagery at times, bordering on an art-film feel at times, trying to convey complex emotions by, say, the appearance of water dripping from a man’s hand. At other times, it goes over the top into ridiculous jump scares with average-at-best CGI. At one point we’re treated to a scene of the doll moving on its own, trying to get a knife from a coffee table by nudging the table a lot to make the knife fall. Unfortunately, it just comes across like the doll is humping the table leg, completely ruining any of the scene’s tension by the way it made me burst out laughing. The plot of the movie was fairly average as far as supernatural thrillers go, but it was the special effects that just ruined it, because they came across so ridiculously.

That, plus the whole subplot with the song seems somewhat without purpose. There are hints that it’s all influenced by the curse on the house and the doll, especially given what happens to one of the initial singers who hears it, but the second singer seems to be unaffected. It seems to serve largely as a distraction. There’s a slight connection to the story of what happened with a previous owner of the house being cheated on and going round the twist, but even that reveal was only there to serve as flavour.

And if you’re curious as to what the lyrics are that keep making people ill and/or depressed and suicidal, you’re out of luck if you watch the same version I did. No subtitles for the long lyrics. Which effectively killed any interest I had in that subplot, since my understanding hit a brick wall and it felt incredibly unresolved.

The original curse seems to have come from one twin accidentally killing the other in some weird game, only the twin dies from being pointed at and killed in-game, which I guess made him die because the doll was involved. Except the doll wasn’t cursed then. Or was it? And if so, how? That never really gets explained that well, and each answer just leads to more questions until you’re ready to just throw up your hands and say, “Fine, the doll’s haunted, and that’s all I need to know.”

Maybe it was a limitation of what the subtitles conveyed, I don’t know. Maybe if I didn’t need to rely on them, the whole thing would be much clearer and make more sense. As it was, this was a movie that lacked coherent origin or direction, had laughable special effects, ended ambiguously and predictably, and ultimately was more of a laugh than a scare. Not one I’d watch again, and honestly, not one I really enjoyed watching in the first place.

I’m a fan of J-horror. I couldn’t exactly tell you why. Maybe it’s that I often find the visuals in J-horror to be really creepy. Maybe it’s that so far I’ve been lucky enough to mostly watch good ones. Maybe it’s because they’re a nice break from the zombies and serial killers that take feature roles in many North American horror flicks.

Whatever the reason, when I saw that Netflix had a new J-horror movie in its offerings, I decided to sit down and see what it was all about.

It’s worth taking a moment, before we even get into discussions of the plot, to point out the unfortunate English title. Ring of Curse. If you read that and are reminded of the hit movie, The Ring, you’re not alone. The very title starts you off with what will quickly be revealed to be a rather derivative movie, taking elements from half a dozen other successful J-horror franchises, and those are just the ones that I could spot at a glance.

For my part, the original title, Gomen nasai (generally translated as, “I’m sorry,”) is a much for fitting title when you see what the story actually is.

The movie opens with Japanese pop group Buono talking about how the idea for the movie came from a story on a cell phone novel site. Which also consists of an apology for how certain scenes may not make sense, but they wanted to portray them as close to the story as possible. It’s never a good sign when a movie starts by apologizing for the fact that it might not make any sense.

The movie then cuts to a screen filled with words of death and despair, before launching into the story. Yuka is a high school student with an interest in writing. Despite that, when it comes time to organize the school play, the task of writing the script is given to Kurohane, a very unpopular and creepy girl who only is assigned that task so that more popular students can mock and torment her about it. Kurohane knows this, but throws herself into the work anyway. However, students who read even unfinished pieces of the manuscript start to die, and Yuka seems to be the only one who believes Kurohane has cursed them through her writing.

Yuke confronts Kurohane about this, and is told that yes, the writing is cursed, but Kurohane doesn’t worry about being brought to justice because she’s dying of cancer, and her death will only make the curse stronger. Before she dies, she sends a text message to Yuka’s phone, which Yuka refuses to read as she fears the curse will kill her the way it has killed others. Each cursed victim dies by asphyxiation.

Possibly the creepiest image in this entire movie.

So Kurohane dies, the message goes unread, and time passes. Months later, Yuka’s friends get ahold of the cell phone and see the message, and as they begin to die off, Yuka realises the curse has lost none of its power. Nor do they know how to defeat it. All they know is that you don’t have to read the message to be curse, only to see it. People are killed one by one, and the order in which they’re killed is random.

Then comes Yuka’s “Aha!” moment when she realises that she’s being targeted because she’s the only one left. If she shows the message to others, there’s a chance Kurohane’s curse will come after them instead, since the order is random. The more people cursed, the greater her chances of survival. So she does the only thing she can think of to spread the curse far and wide.

She uploads the text message to a cell phone novel site. And begins to tell her story.

I hope that cell phone novel site had a contest with a good cash prize, Yuka, since you’ll need to pay for therapy to get this image out of your head.

If you’re still seeing similarities to The Ring, it’s because they’re all so very obvious. A curse that spreads by people seeing a specific thing. The progenitor of that curse dying and making the curse more powerful. And the only way to save yourself is to show it to other people. It also had shades of Ju-On, some visuals that reminded me of scenes from Fatal Frame games, the whole “killing people one by one” bit seemed right out of Another, and was largely a mish-mash of J-horror tropes all rolled into one. It had 1 scene of physical violence, a few creepy images, but for the most part, had little to make it original and to stand out. It was a decent teen horror movie, but nothing spectacular.

Until you get to the meta aspect of the movie, that turns this from a “meh” movie into an amusing display of viral marketing. Again, it’s not unlike the viral marketing campaign that accompanied The Ring, where unmarked VHS tapes were left in random locations, all with the recording of the cursed video. At the end, when Yuka decides to save herself by uploading everything to a cell phone novel site, it ties back to the movie’s introduction, in which viewers were told that this movie is based on something read on a similar site. And the screen full of creepy words at the beginning were the words of Kurohane’s curse. You don’t have to read Japanese to be cursed. You just have to see the words. This was Buono’s attempt to save themselves after stumbling across Yuka’s attempt to save herself. So it’s a sly little play on viral marketing, albeit not a very original one.

This also brings me back to the issue of the movie’s title. I have to really stretch my brain to figure out how Ring of Curse can actually relate to the movie at all. Curse, sure, but Ring? Best I can come up with is that it’s a reference to how the curse works in groups, killing people one by one, so it seems almost like it’s gone in a circle by the time it comes back to you. But that is a damn stretch, and more likely the title was devised by people who wanted to cash it on the fact that The Ring is a well-known J-horror title in North America even today. Gomen nasai, however, works well not just because it’s one of Kurohane’s lines in the movie as she hands over the first version of her cursed writing, but also as an apology to the viewer. “Sorry, but by watching this, you’re now cursed.” It’s a meaning that goes beyond just trying to sound creepy.

Kurohane is a surprisingly sympathetic antagonist. Always having been unpopular and with a rather typical yurei appearance, she was made fun of a lot, until she decided to strike back by writing the word noroi (“curse”) all over a bullying classmate’s notebook. In her own blood. Hey, I never claimed she wasn’t creepy as hell. But it was from that moment on that her parents changed, neglecting her in favour of her younger sister, isolating her and generally treating her poorly, even after her cancer diagnosis. Kurohane grew up in a terrible situation, and so she turned inward until her bitterness had to have an outlet, until she stopped trying to convince herself that there was something she could do to win back her family’s love. Her vengeance against those who wronged her was brutal and out of proportion to some of the wrongs done to her, but when her background is revealed, you really can’t help but feel sorry for her.

It’s worth mentioning that if anyone else wants to watch this movie and has to rely on English subtitles… don’t expect much in the way of quality from the subtitles. Their timing is pretty decent, but there were frequent odd turns of phrase that probably came from weird translations, punctuation and capital letters went missing, and Kurohane’s name was either subtitled properly or as “Kuroha,” which made me think that there were only 2 subtitlers working on this movie and they never once spoke to each other or compared notes. The subtitles are good enough to get you through the movie and properly convey the plot, but they’re far from what I’d call good.

Is it worth watching? Eh, well, it’s an okay movie to kill an afternoon. It’s nothing special, its inspirations are blatant and many, and most of the value lies in the implications of the plot rather than the plot itself. If you’re a fan of J-horror, it’s probably worth taking a look at, though with the caveat that it’s not worth taking seriously. If J-horror isn’t something that particularly interests you, well really, you’re not going to miss anything by passing this one over.

Offscreen bonus! While watching a movie about a curse that kills people by asphyxiation, my asthma was acting up due to pollen and multiple people cutting their lawns in the area. It probably says something about me that I actually found this more ironically funny than ironically creepy.

Note – I’d like to stress right from the get-go that I haven’t read the novel that this movie was based on, so any commentary I make comes straight from the movie itself, not a comparison between the movie and the book. Thus if I give praise or make a complaint about something and you know it to be different in the source material, that’s not relevent to what I’m doing here. I have not read it, and so I will not comment on it.

With that aside, let’s jump right into the review of…

The story revolves around Ethan, your average attractive high school student, and Lena, new to town and part of a family with a long and despised heritage when it comes to their involvement with the small town of Gatlin. They’ve both been dreaming about each other before they ever met, and naturally, as is par for the course in just about anything, they’re destined to fall in love and be together. It’s a foregone conclusion; even other characters talk about how they’ve been tied to each other since birth, even though they only have known each other for a few weeks.

Which I’ve expressed my distaste with in the past, so I won’t bother going on about it again at length here. The Instalove trope has never entertained me, and it find it painfully overdone and trite. That being said, I do think the actual relationship aspect of the romance was done pretty decently. They’re kind of adorable as a couple. For all that Lena calls Ethan charming and that he could fit in anywhere, I think he’s a somewhat awkward kid who speaks before he thinks and that leads to some very realistic conversations between them. In the early stages of them knowing each other, he tries to impress her and comes out with some corny lines that come across, well, as a teenage boy trying to impress a pretty girl. It’s not eloquent or containing any insight into her secrets or his soul, but awkward and silly and they both realise it. So for my part, I do think that was actually done rather well. So when the focus is on that and less on how meant for each other they clearly are, I enjoyed the two of them far more.

The crux of the story centres, however, on Lena, as she is from a family of casters, magic-users, and as per tradition, on her 16th birthday, she will be claimed for either good or evil, with no choice in the matter. Males in the family have a choice, but for females, it’s all decided for them, in accordance with their inner natures. Lena fears, because she has a hard time controlling her powers when her temper flares, that she’ll be claimed for darkness, though she doesn’t want to be. Picture the Hogwarts Sorting Hat, only with 2 Houses and it doesn’t give a crap about your choices and desires. And that Lena has fallen in love means she won’t be able to resist being claimed for darkness, something which I don’t think was explained very well though it was brought up quite a bit as the movie advanced.

The family patriarch, Macon (played by Jeremy Irons, whose southern accent had more than a strong touch of British to it), declares that Lena is no longer allowed to see Ethan, ever again, to try to avoid darkness as best she can. Which is something that baffled me and seemed a bit over the top when you consider that it really only mattered until her 16th birthday had passed and she had been claimed. After that, the danger would have passed and they could be together without risk. But that didn’t seem to occur to anyone; it was an all-or-nothing deal. I don’t know, maybe in the book somebody points out this flaw in the logic, or there’s a better reason for it, but there was certainly nothing in the movie to indicate why they couldn’t just wait for a while.

I was quite pleased by what eventually happened with Lena’s claiming, though it wasn’t a surprise thanks to an earlier scene hinting very strongly at it. But it’s nice to see balance portrayed as a good alternative to the only choices being at either end of a spectrum.

I do want to take a moment to talk about a particularly painful scene, though, and by that I mean it caused by insides to shrivel a little from all the demonstrated hate, rather than it being a poor scene. The church scene. Half the adults in the town turn up to discuss expelling Lena from school due to rumours of Satanism surrounding her family and the fact that classroom windows exploded while she was being bullied. I admit I did have a hard time believing the realism of this scene, since nobody seemed to want to stand up and ask, “So how are you claiming that this girl blew out a room full of windows without being near them?” But maybe that disbelief comes from the fact that I live in a place where this sort of religious fervour doesn’t really happen much, and I know the American south is rather known for it. Maybe it was realistic to have people behaving that way, I don’t know. Either way, it hurt to watch it, watching that kind of small town mentality meeting to decide a kid’s future based largely on the fact that they disagree with what they think she believes.

It was chilling to watch. Honestly, it was more chilling to watch before the spirit of a dark caster possessed the woman doing most of the speaking. Mundane terrors can hit so much harder than supernatural ones, sometimes.

When you get right down to it, I found that Beautiful Creatures was a pretty good movie, quite a bit more so than most novel adaptations I’ve seen recently. The story was reasonably well crafted and with very few small exceptions, made good sense, which is something I find actually gets missed a surprising amount in adaptations. A lot of books-to-movies seem to get made on the assumption that any watchers have already read the books and know the story, so their job is just to put some shiny visuals up and not bother to keep the plot coherent. Beautiful Creatures didn’t fall into that trap. The acting, too, was quite good, most notable in the case of Alden Ehrenreich (playing Ethan), who did a fantastic job and whose work I look forward to seeing more of in the future. Definitely an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours, especially if you enjoy supernatural YA flicks.

For anyone who saw and loved the animated movie of Peter S Beagle’s classic fantasy novel, The Last Unicorn, this is a real treat for you. The movie is being visually touched up, enhanced, and put on the big screen across the US and Canada. And possibly other places after that, but so far North America seems to be the big focus.

The chance to see one of my favourite animated fantasy movies in theatres? Sign me up!

And better than that, since it’s a tour instead of just a rerelease, Peter Beagle is going to be at the theatres. In person. Signing books.

Please excuse my fandrogynous squee!

I don’t hold out much hope that my local movie theatre will be one that’s included in the tour. This entire province usually gets skipped over when it comes to big events. But for this, I’m willing to travel. And will make sure I’m able to travel. No way I’m missing this if I can help it!

Is this exciting to anyone else? Or am I just too big a fandrogyne for this movie?

Yesterday, I went to go see The Woman in Black in theatres. Now, please keep in mind during this review that I have not read the book, and thus comments such as, “That was explained in the book,” or “The book did it better,” may well be true, but I did not know them at the time of watching, nor will I base my opinion of the movie on them. That being said, let me get into the meat of things.

The set-up is an interesting one. Old-timey setting, interesting little introduction scene of three children leaping to their deaths, revelation of family tragedy of the main character, Arthur Kipps, and then he’s whisked away to a backwater village in order to sort out a legal matter. The matter isn’t, to the best of my memory, fully explained – he’s there to double-check some information in a mountain of paperwork inside an old manor-house, so the assumption is that whoever lived there recently died and there’s a dispute of ownership. However, he gets there and finds that everything is covered in dust and cobwebs, and people in the village mention that no one has lived there in years. Perhaps some connecting piece of imformation was mentioned and I just didn’t catch it, I’m not sure.

Anyway, as the story goes on, Kipps finds himself seeing unpleasant things in the house. A spectral figure of a woman in black, of course. Things moving. Shadows and figures darting about. Typical horror movie fare. And in the village, people are hostile to him, urging him to leave, and then blaming him for the children who seem to start dying shortly after his arrival. And let’s not forget the woman who believes she’s channeling the spirit of her deceased son and scratches the image of a hanged woman into the table in front of him. There’s a mystery to be solved!

Rather than have the main character get goaded into solving the mystery and vanquishing the ghost in a determined fashion, I was actually happy to see him demonstrate some very real fear. I’m always happy to see characters act fearful, because, well, those events are creepy, and evoke fear! Having them get determined and with a set jaw is all well and good, but let’s be honest; it’s a minority of people who face threats like that with nothing but anger at the violation of their personal space.

The movie was tremendously atmospheric, building a great deal of tension as the scenes went on. Unfortunately, a good deal of the tension was ruined by bog-standard jump-scares and overdone creepy imagery. The woman in black has a distorted face beyond her blach veil, skin mottled and dead, which, frankly, didn’t need to be done to make her scary to the audience. The effect of her standing shadow-like and quiet in a corner did far more to get my heart racing than the times she leapt screaming at the camera when her face was clear. The creepy images of old toys moving of their own accord (especially that doll with the pointed teeth – who in hell makes something like that!?) lingers in my mind more than the sound of that scream. It was overdone in some places, and while yes, I did jump at all the right times, I was hoping for more subtle scares.

It reminded me a bit of The Ring, the North American version of the Japanese movie Ringu (if you haven’t seen either, I recommend you do). Dead people were found with their faces warped in fear, pale and greenish and partially rotting. Someone had asked the producers of the movie if they did that as a representation of what a person would look like after spending 7 days underwater, as Samara had in the well. The reply was, “No, we just thought it looked creepy.” Creepy, but pointless, and ultimately not what people will remember.

The only other thing that bothered me about the movie were the appearances of all the dead children that the woman in black had taken. Kipps sees them at night, in the house, surrounding it silently and being very creepy about it. Effective as a scare, but why were they there? The only thing that makes sense to me is that they were there, at the house, because that’s where the woman was, and just as she had taken their lives now she wouldn’t let them go even in death. But that doesn’t tally with the ending of the movie, when the woman in black lures the Kipps’s son onto the railroad tracks, and both the son and Kipps die. They presence of the Kipps’s dead wife, glowing and dressed in white as a contrast to the darkness, signify that nope, when you die you can move on even if the woman is the one who lures you to your death. So why were the children there? Coming up with an explanation requires some mind-twisting that goes beyond the context of the movie, and ultimately I can only conclude that the children were there mostly to creep the audience out again.

But in spite of its flaws, the story and the atmosphere of this movie were commendable, and it was highly effective at scaring the living crap out of me. It’s definitely intrigued me enough to want to read the book (the review of which will likely be coming later this month, as there’s now a copy of it that I have access to). I rate this movie 4 out of 5 teacups, since that’s how many I’ll need to drink to calm down before going to sleep.

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Fantastic book, loved reading it, definitely recommended
Very enjoyable, a few issues but still well worth reading
Decent, problems detracted from enjoyment somewhat, but still worth giving a try
Some serious issues, was a struggle to read, not worth keeping around
I'm sorry I wasted my time on this...

Disclaimer

Any books received by the publisher or author for review will be noted as such. Any books without this notification are owned by me or were borrowed from friends or the library. All reviews here are my honest opinion, uninfluenced by the manner in which I obtained the book, and no money was provided in exchange for me writing said reviews.